The film's prologue opened in
Budapest (with a fly-over), where IMF (Impossible Missions Force)
agent Trevor Hanaway (Josh Holloway) was pursued by three agents,
whom he shot and killed (two were shot as he fell backwards
from a building's roof). On assignment, he had successfully intercepted
a satchel with classified files from a courier. However, as he
was about to receive a phone alert about an ASSASSIN, he was shot
and killed in an alleyway by the identified French killer for hire
named Sabine Moreau (Léa
Seydoux), who then took the satchel of files from the slain agent.

The next scene was set in Moscow at Rankow Prison,
where veteran IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) (pretending to
be a Russian named Sergei) was incarcerated. [Hunt had been imprisoned
for vengefully murdering in cold-blood six Serbian nationals he
thought were responsible for his wife Julia Meade's (Michelle Monaghan)
vicious murder, considered an "unsanctioned hit" by IMF.]
As he was being extracted and rescued by IMF cohorts, including
Hanaway's team leader Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and newly-promoted
high-tech wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), Hunt risked the mission
by backtracking to search for his intel source and fellow prisoner
Bogdan (Miraj Grbic). Dunn had locked the security office and
opened cell gates to obstruct the guards and cause a prison riot,
while Carter was in an underground sewer awaiting Hunt's arrival
- timed to the end of the broadcast of Dean Martin's crooning of "Ain't
That a Kick in the Head." When
the rescue mission succeeded, the credits began to roll with Lalo
Schifrin's familiar theme music - with a lighted fuse providing
continuity through a series of images foreshadowing the film's
action sequences.

As the IMF team in the back of a van driven by Dunn
sped away from the Russian prison, Carter described Hanaway's failed
IMF mission ("a simple intercept"), seen again in flashback.
At the last possible moment, the courier was identified on an arriving
Budapest train as Marek Stefanski. With a quick stabbing of his
spiked signet ring marked A113 (also Hunt's code number), Hanaway
easily drugged Stefanski and stole the files in a satchel, although
he was pursued by other "armed hostiles." The triggered
warning about the identity of the assassin on Hanaway's cellphone
came too late. Contract killer Sabine Moreau, who often worked
for diamonds, shot him and he died in girlfriend Carter's arms.

More importantly, the files contained Russian nuclear
launch codes, desired by an "emerging extremist" - a
person of interest code-named Cobalt, who was "determined
to detonate a nuclear weapon however he can." It was thought
that Moreau would deliver the launch codes to Cobalt, who was a
Level-1 nuclear strategist for Russian intelligence. The only way
to learn Cobalt's real identity was to infiltrate
the secret Moscow Kremlin archives and locate files identifying
him. Hunt would impersonate a military officer, Russian intelligence
operative General Anatoly Fedorov (Vladimir Mashkov), to get past
security checkpoints, while Dunn served as his attache aide. It
was reported that Cobalt was already en route to destroy any records
of his identity, and the IMF mission to counteract him had to occur
within the next 5 hours.

In an
elaborate setup within the Kremlin, Dunn and Hunt created a diversionary
tactic. They fooled the Kremlin's hall guard into thinking that
the Archives Room hallway was shorter than it was, employing a
lightweight screen that acted as a hologram projecting the illusion
of the hallway behind it into the guard’s
eye. After gaining access to the file room cabinet, Hunt discovered
that the tapes to identify Cobalt were empty - stolen by Cobalt
himself, who was "piggybacking" on
the IMF's own frequency to broadcast their whereabouts and alert
the Russians - thereby implicating Hunt and the IMF team as the
cause of the break-in. As the mission aborted, Hunt fled from the
scene, passed Cobalt in the hallway (who was carrying a steel briefcase
containing the Russian nuclear launch-control device), changed
into tourist garb outside, and was stunned by a detonated bomb
that destroyed the Kremlin. [Cobalt had set the bomb to cover his
tracks.] Suffering from a mild concussion, Hunt awoke handcuffed
to a hospital stretcher, and learned that the official explanation
for the bombing was a gasline explosion underneath Kremlin Square
(although it was speculated that the bombing a "targeted attack" and "undeclared
act of aggression").
Russian agent Anatoly Sidorov (Vladimir Mashkov) identified the
framed Hunt as the leader of the attack. Hunt picked his cuffs,
and fled to a building ledge, where he evaded capture by ziplining
onto the back of a moving van and then tumbled to the ground unharmed.

At
a rendezvous point, Hunt (code-named Alpha 113) was extracted by
the IMF and picked up in a van. While being transported, Hunt was
briefed by embarrassed IMF Secretary (Tom Wilkinson) and his Chief
Analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) (who was actually a former
IMF field agent). The Secretary was bound for Washington to turn
in his resignation, after the blame for the Kremlin's bombing was
firmly planted on the IMF. However, after Hunt described Cobalt's
facial features, he was identified as a Swedish-born Russian
nuclear endgame strategist and fired professor of physics at Stockholm
University named Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist). The deranged
physicist was accompanied by his right-hand man, a known operative
named Marius Wistrom (Samuli Edelmann). Now implicated by the Russians
in a global terrorist nuclear bombing plot, the White House had
disavowed that the covert IMF agency existed, by invoking and initiating
a dreaded black-ops contingency measure called "ghost protocol."
It meant "no satellite, safe house, support, or extraction." Although
Hunt could be returned to Washington to be punished as a "rogue
extremist" by the DOD, he would be allowed to escape from
government custody - to operate and track down Cobalt on his own.
If caught or killed, any member of his team would be branded as
terrorists.

Suddenly, the van was hit by gunfire from Russian
security forces led by Sidorov, and the IMF Secretary and driver were
killed. The vehicle plunged into a river, and Brandt and Hunt
escaped underwater after floating the Secretary's corpse (lighted
by a flare) as a decoy to draw the bullets away from them. They
boarded a green freight train car numbered 47, a control center
manned by Carter and Dunn, where they viewed a video of a speech
delivered by Hendricks. The psychotic nuclear extremist preached
nuclear annihilation, vowing that it would initiate a new stage
of human evolution:

And what little remains
is made stronger. Put simply, world destruction is an unpleasant,
but necessary part of evolution. What happens then, I wondered,
when mankind faces the next end of the world. I looked to Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, thriving cities rebuilt from the ashes, monuments to
the unimaginable, dedicated to the concept of peace. It occurred
to me here that nuclear war might have a place in the natural
order. But only if it could be controlled. Only if it touched
every living soul equally.

Sabine Moreau had in her possession the nuclear launch
activation codes (stolen from IMF's Hanaway and the Budapest courier),
and was planning to rendezvous with Wistrom in about
36 hours at the Burj Hotel in Dubai. With the codes, Hendricks
could launch a nuclear missile attack on the United States. [Meanwhile,
Polish-born cryptographer Leonid Lisenker (Ivan Shvedoff) was kidnapped
from his apartment by a menacing Cobalt and Wistrom, while his
wife Anna (Petra Lustigova) and son Alex (Daniel Clarke) were killed.]
Now off the grid, Hunt described the objective of their unsanctioned
IMF mission to his three rag-tag rogue team operatives, to clear
the organization's name: "Our objective is to intercept the
sale, replace the authentic codes with counterfeits, and follow
Wistrom to Hendricks."
Carter was pleased to be able to have the opportunity to seek revenge
by murdering Moreau, but Hunt stressed that their prime target
was Hendricks, not Wistrom or Moreau.

In a complicated arrangement in their 119th floor
hotel room in Dubai set up as a control room, Hunt's team-members
were planning to construct a duplicate decoy room to fool Wistrom
into believing that he was meeting with Moreau (impersonated by
Carter), while in one room lower on the 118th floor, Dunn would
double as Wistrom and meet with the real Moreau. The main requirement,
however, was that they had to control the elevators and security
cameras. This meant that Hunt had to access the hotel's server
room on the 130th floor ("eleven
stories up and seven units over" from their location) - from
the outside -
within 30 minutes. After they cut open a large pane of glass in
their own room, Hunt thrillingly scaled up
the outside panes of sheer glass, assisted by bonding, magnetic-adhesive
gloves (one of which failed), then cut the server room glass eleven
stories higher, and broke through the opening to access the hotel's
servers. Rooms on the 119th floor were renumbered as 118 as part
of the clever plan, but their precise plans were upset when Moreau
arrived early, and Wistrom was unexpectedly accompanied by Linseker,
who was there to authenticate the launch codes. To return to the
119th floor, Hunt raced or abseiled down an unfurled rope-line
which unfortunately didn't extend long enough. He had to make a
spectacular freefall jump back into the open window. The team was
forced to improvise when the facial-mask making machine failed.
In a quick change of plans, Hunt decided that the real launch codes
had to be exchanged with Wistrom, and that he and Brandt would
daringly impersonate Wistrom and Linseker.

On floor 119 (in room G), Carter (impersonating Moreau)
met with the real Wistrom and Linseker, while below on floor 118
(in room G), Hunt and Brandt (impersonating Wistrom and Linseker)
met with the real Moreau and her three body-guards. Both IMF teams
were separately able to convince Moreau and Wistrom that the exchange
of codes and diamonds could be made, while Benji (acting as room
service with tea was replacing Wistrom's real diamonds with fake
ones, and delivering the real diamonds to Moreau for authentication).
After the launch codes were confirmed as real by Linseker, Wistrom
hurriedly left the room and shot Linseker in the elevator corridor.
In the other room after a successful exchange, Moreau skillfully
identified Brandt as an agent when she noticed a contact
lens (functioning as a document scanner) over his left eye - and
she fled.

Two chases occurred simultaneously:

Carter gladly went after Moreau one floor below,
apprehended her, and led her at gunpoint into the team's control
room on the 119th floor, where Moreau attempted to kill Dunn;
after a struggle, Carter kicked Moreau out the open window to
her death a mile below on the ground

Hunt chased after Wistrom (with the codes), who
descended in the hotel elevator; in the lobby, Hunt was waylaid for
a few moments to fight off Russian agent Sidorov before pursuing
Wistrom, as a sandstorm engulfed the entire hotel complex and
city; the foot race evolved into an exciting car chase, which
ended in a collision and Wistrom's escape on the back of a truck

As he successfully got away, Wistrom removed a face
mask, revealing that he was Hendricks in disguise.

When the IMF
team rendezvoused again, Brandt accused Carter of compromising
the mission by killing Moreau, and Hunt accused Brandt of being
more than an "analyst" with his display of IMF agent skills. While
Hunt was gone, Brandt described his background to the others: he
had been on a "protection detail" in Croatia providing security
for Hunt and his wife Julia, when a Serbian hit squad killed Julia
(her body was found three days later) and he decided to leave the
IMF as a field agent: "I couldn't face another life-or-death situation
after that." He still felt guilty and responsible for the incident
(for not warning Hunt of known danger), and only recently learned
that Hunt had been imprisoned by the Russians for his revenge-killings
of six Serbian nationals.

Meanwhile, Hunt contacted his intel Russian informant
Bogdan and his arms-dealing cousin, to gather information about
Kurt Hendricks and his location. He asked: "He has a case,
he has codes, but they're worthless without a tactical satellite.
I want to know where he'd get it." Although the Dubai arms
dealer declined to help, he mentioned that "Russia quietly
sold an obsolete tactical satellite to a certain telecom in Mumbai," and
that it would take
"special skills" to shut it down. After speaking to Hunt,
the cousin tipped off Sidorov by phone, and offered (for a price)
to retrieve both the stolen Kremlin launch codes and the American
- Hunt.

On their way on a jet to Mumbai, India, the IMF team
identified their target - rich, playboyish, Indian telecommunications
and "multimedia tycoon" Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor), who
had built his seemingly state-of-the-art media-based business with
Cold War cast-offs, including a Novosti satellite. Hendricks needed
the defunct Soviet military satellite to launch a nuclear strike.
The team had to acquire from Brij Nath the access code to the satellite
in order to shut it down before Hendricks programmed it to fire
a nuclear missile. According to Dunn, that would require manually
tapping into the central server to take it offline. Brandt (wearing
a special anti-gravity suit under his clothes that was controlled
by a robotic rover below him) was called upon to enter the server
room by dropping down a narrow tunnel above a large turbine server
ventilating fan, navigating through the central server's exhaust
vent, floating in mid-air above the computer array, and jacking
into the panel to disarm it. Hunt would then feed him the stolen
access code (from Nath) to deactivate the missile, and also use
it to pinpoint Hendricks' location.

During a lavish black-tie party while Hunt quarterbacked
(or engineered) the team's plans, seductively-dressed Carter (code-named
Venus) in a breast-accentuating silk green dress acted coyly to
attract Brij Nath's attentions. She allowed Hunt to kiss her in
full view, and then let entranced Nath lure her to view his
private art collection in his bedroom. At the same moment, however,
the wily Hendricks (who had anticipated Hunt's plan) and cohort
Wistrom entered the headquarters of SUN Network, a state-run television
station in Mumbai with a broadcasting tower, where he uplinked
to the satellite, rebooted to original military specs, and downloaded
a virus from the satellite to kill the central server where Brandt
and Dunn were working. Hendricks effectively took the server offline
before the IMF could kill the satellite. Then, after reprogramming
the satellite, Hendricks successfully acquired nuclear missile
launch capability within five minutes. In Nath's bedroom, Carter
with a neck-breaking head-lock coerced the playboy to reveal the
satellite's access code over-ride sequence (46, 82, 93), which
was relayed to Dunn. The information also unlocked Hendricks'
signaling location 6.7 miles away from Hunt. With Sidorov on his
tail, Hunt (with Carter) left the party and sped away in a vehicle
toward the broadcast TV station ("the rallying point"),
where they hoped to delay Hendricks' nuclear missile launching,
and meet up with Brandt and Dunn.

However, they had only about three minutes to counteract
Hendricks, who had
already weaponized the restored, online satellite and uploaded
new authentication codes to lock Russian Central Command out of
the system so that the launch couldn't be verified. He sent a signal
to fire only one nuclear warhead from a Russian nuclear submarine
submerged in the Central Pacific, code-named Operation "Iron
Fist," and
aimed at San Francisco. He hoped it would be interpreted by the
US as Russian retaliation for the destruction of the Kremlin ("That
should start the ball rolling"). Hendricks also contacted
the submarine commander and told him to cease verification efforts.
Hunt knew that their only remaining option, with time running out,
was to abort the warhead. They had to hurriedly get to the launch
device in the steel briefcase - in Hendricks' possession.

When Hunt and Carter drove up to the front of the
TV network building, Hendricks fled on foot (with Hunt in pursuit),
while Wistrom reentered the building (followed by Carter) and attempted
to disable the relay from the TV station by ripping out computer
cables in the network control room. He also fired upon Carter and
wounded her in the abdomen, and then turned off the main power
switch to the building. Dunn and Brandt suddenly appeared as back-up,
and while Dunn struggled to bring the station back online to transmit
the abort codes, Brandt pursued Wistrom into the electrical power
room to restore the power, as Hunt chased after Hendricks for possession
of the launch-control device (in the case) within a nearby multi-tiered,
fully-mechanized, circular parking garage. After a fight to the
death against Hunt on a series of moving car ramps, Hendricks made
a fatal jump to his death with the case, hoping to ensure the launch's
success.

Worried about his fellow agent Brandt's long absence,
Dunn followed after him, confronted Wistrom choking
Brandt - and killed him. This freed Brandt to flip the main power
switch, to reactivate the broadcast relay to the satellite, and
allowed Hunt to transmit a deactivation signal to the satellite
and missile - just in time. With only one second remaining, Hunt
cried out
"Mission Accomplished" as he pushed the launch device
button to disarm the missile. In flight, the deactivated missile
still struck and damaged part of the top of the Transamerica Building
in San Francisco before plunging harmlessly into SF Bay. Hendricks
lived long enough to witness his plan's failure. [Later, the DOD
explained the missile impact as a possible meteorite.] At that
same moment, Sidorov arrived with armed support and suddenly realized
that Hunt had aborted the nuclear missile, and had purposely allowed
the Russians to track him: "So, we are not enemies. The phone
call from that arms dealer in Dubai. You wanted me to find you.
How else to believe this?"

Eight weeks later, the surviving four IMF team members,
some still healing from wounds, reconvened for beers in Seattle,
where Hunt was speaking to his former colleague Luther Stickell
(Ving Rhames). After meeting the other three agents, Luther departed,
promising Hunt: "I'll see you in Kandahar." Hunt then offered the
eager agents a new assignment - delivered on individual cellphones,
but Brandt was the only one to reject the new mission. He reasoned
that he had failed in his previous mission in Croatia when Hunt's
wife Julia was murdered.

The film's twist was Hunt's revelation
that her death was secretly staged - as a pretext for him to kill
six Serbians and be imprisoned in Russia, where he could use Bogdan
as an informant to get to Hendricks. Relieved by the surprise admission,
Brandt shook Hunt's hand ("We're good") and accepted the
new mission. At the same time, Hunt watched Julia as she walked off
in the distance, turned, and smiled at him. He disappeared in a cloud
of smoke on the way to his next mission, to confront an "emerging
terror organization known as the Syndicate." The new challenge
was that the terrorist organization had control of the US' entire
drone fleet, although their targets were unknown.

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

This was the fourth film in the loosely TV-based blockbuster
franchise-series of sequels, a supplemental addition that revitalized
the action genre. The time period was approximately 5 years since
the previous installment, about the same time that had elapsed in
the meantime, while it retained continuity with plot elements from
the end of the third film.

This was famed Pixar director Brad Bird's live-action
directorial debut film. It was the first film in the series to be
released in IMAX.

The film's running gag was that many of IMF's high-tech
gadgets didn't work as expected: the mission message delivered
in a decrepit Russian phone booth that didn't self-destruct, unreliable
glass-scaling suction gloves, the facial latex mask-making machine,
etc.

With a production budget of $145 million, and box-office
gross receipts of $209.4 million (domestic) and $694.7 million (worldwide)
- and the second highest-grossing film of the first four films in
the series.

Set-pieces: Hunt's prison break
from a Moscow prison, the daring undercover failed break-in at the
Kremlin, Hunt's ascent and descent of Dubai's towering Burj Khalifa
skyscraper (the tallest building in the world), the duplicate exchange
of diamonds/codes sequence, and the subsequent chase during a Dubai
sandstorm, and the final one-on-one struggle between Hendricks and
Hunt in a fully-mechanized, circular parking garage.